Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Mid-Week Post

At least 56 people were killed and 70 injured when a train derailed
on the outskirts of the northern Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela
on Wednesday in one of Europe's worst rail disasters.

Bodies covered in blankets lay next to the overturned carriages
as smoke billowed from the wreckage. Firefighters clambered over the
twisted metal trying to get survivors out of the windows, while
ambulances and fire engines surrounded the scene.

Shocking new revelations to the committee investigating the
cancellation of two gas-fired power plants show that despite her
testimony to the contrary, new Premier Kathleen Wynne was very much part
of the conversations surrounding the scandal's coverup.

In a
July 22 letter to the Standing Committee on Justice Policy, deputy
minister of government services Kevin Costante confirms that 1,233
backup tapes have been found - so far - containing Wynne e-mails about
the gas plant cancellations.

The
letter doesn't give any clue as to how many gas plant e-mails are on
each of these tapes - only that the tapes have been found.

In
testimony to the gas plant committee on June 6, Wynne denied any
involvement in decisions to break her own government's record-keeping
laws by deleting the e-mails.

"Those were decisions that were
made by other people in other conversations and I wasn't part of those
conversations ... I wasn't in those rooms," she told the committee.

"I can't speak to the motivation and I can't speak to the behind the scenes, because I wasn't in those conversations."The
1,233 tapes belonging to Wynne's e-mail account are part of some 3,226
"responsive" backup tapes found, including 1,494 tapes containing gas
plant e-mails of former energy minister Chris Bentley.

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has changed his tune on pot — and he's
calling for the drug to be legalized to keep it away from Canadian kids.

The rookie leader is shown endorsing marijuana's legalization in a
clip of a Liberal rally in pot-friendly British Columbia that was
posted on Youtube Tuesday.

"I'm actually not in favour of decriminalizing cannabis," he told the enthusiastic crowd of supporters.

"I'm in favour of legalizing it, tax it, regulate it. It's one of
the only ways to keep it out of the hands of our kids because the
current war on drugs, the current model is not working. We have to use
evidence and science to make sure we're moving forward on that."

Of course that will happen, just the same way booze and cigarettes are kept away from kids. Sure.

The family rescued from a car accident by George Zimmerman, days
after he was cleared of wrongdoing in the fatal shooting of unarmed
black teenager Trayvon Martin, cancelled plans to thank him publicly
because they fear being linked to someone reviled by many Americans,
Zimmerman’s lawyer said on Wednesday.

“The family, who really wanted to thank George for doing what he
did publicly ... realized that in any way connecting yourself with
George Zimmerman is right now very toxic,” Mark O’Mara, Zimmerman’s lead
attorney, told CNN.

A U.S. bankruptcy court judge on Wednesday dealt a blow to Detroit's
public employee unions and pension funds opposed to the city's historic
bankruptcy filing by suspending legal challenges in Michigan state
courts while he reviews the city's petition for protection from
creditors.

Judge Steven Rhodes ordered three lawsuits filed by city workers,
retirees and pension funds be halted and extended that stay to suits
against Michigan's governor, treasurer and Detroit's emergency manager.
Rhodes' action ensures that the only path to fight the city's Chapter 9
bankruptcy petition runs through his courtroom in downtown Detroit.

It also sets the stage for what is expected to be a protracted
and bruising battle over the city's eligibility to restructure more than
$18 billion in debt and pension and healthcare liabilities under the
broad protections of federal bankruptcy law.

Japan scrambled fighter jets on Wednesday after a
Chinese military aircraft flew for the first time through international
airspace near its southern islands out over the Pacific, in a move seen
by Japan as underlining China's maritime expansion.

Ties between China and Japan have been strained by a territorial
dispute over uninhabited East China Sea islets and hawkish Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won a decisive victory in upper house
elections on Sunday.

Japan's Defense Ministry said a Chinese Y-8 airborne early warning
plane flew through airspace between Okinawa prefecture's main island and
the smaller Miyako island in southern Japan out over the Pacific at
around noon and later took the same route back over the East China Sea.

It was an emotional moment, captured on film, when
five-year-old Warren Bernard bolted from his mother's side and reached
for the outstretched hand of his war-bound father in October 1940, and
it will soon be preserved in a public memorial in New Westminster, B.C.

The Metro Vancouver city announced Wednesday it has selected artists
Veronica and Edwin Dam de Nogales to create a bronze memorial based on
the famous photo, "Wait for me, Daddy," taken by The Province newspaper
photographer Claude Dettloff.